Eleven Accords
Eleven Accords brought me back full circle to one of the most thrilling pieces of music I know, Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. In 1980 I had used a ten-minute excerpt for a workshop piece– thirty-three years later, I finally felt ready to tackle the entire work!
Premiered Toronto, November 6, 2013
Created with and first performed by Nicole Rose Bond, Nicole Carr, Alana Elmer, Mairi Greig, Yuichiro Inoue, Megumi Kokuba, Pulga Muchochoma, Laurence Ramsay, Jarrett Siddall, Kaitlin Standeven and Naishi Wang
Music
Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians
Set design and costumes
Cheryl Lalonde
Set design and lighting
Simon Rossiter
Rehearsal direction
Rosemary James
"Top five dance works of 2013: inspired by the rhythms of Steve Reich's hypnotic Music for 18 Musicians, choreographer Christopher House puts his eleven dancers through a literal workout, racing forward, backwards and grouping together for a series of intriguing solos and group sequences that felt improvisatory in the best way."
Glenn Sumi NOW
" It is among the most ambitious and technically complex choreographies devised for this superlative company, pushing the individual skills and physical capabilities of its dancers to new limits and demanding the most adaptive, interpretive and inventive skills of House and his creative team... With Eleven Accords, House seeks a new potential for relational art, one that casts off the cumbersome didactive features that often drag on such initiatives...
Eleven Accords generates and performs its complex counterpoint against vividly implied intersections of planes– Cartesian demarcations of position and location, spherical projections of corporeal occupancy and containment, and palpable somatic fields of sense and relationship. The dancer's movements (within the remarkably spare and effective staging) establish topographies so convincing that it becomes unnecessary to fall into formation. Rather randomness induces a semblance of pattern that satisfies order. House and TDT reach an artistic pinnacle that proves why "concert' can be so fitting a designation for a dance performance."
Ben Portis, The Dance Current
"...the visual interest lies with dancers who pile upon each other like blocks of Lego or else hurtle themselves into the air like human torpedoes. it is exhilarating to watch...
Critics at Large
Photos of Jarrett Siddall, Nicole Rose Bond and the company by Guntar Kravis